This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2025 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Adnan, Etel. Le Poids du Monde 11. 2016, oil on canvas. Private collection.

Oliver Silverman is a PhD Candidate in the CUNY Graduate Center Political Science Department.

I applied to the Mina Rees Library’s Open Knowledge Fellowship because I strongly believe in the principles behind Open Educational Resources and Open Access. Open access (OA) describes a set of priorities, practices, and principles that guide the way that research and scholarly materials are distributed, namely, making them free of cost to readers and easy to access. Instead of paywalls and mazes of login-in pages, open access allows knowledge to be freely distributed in order to contribute to the public good.

Making educational texts accessible and inexpensive enough to actually be read and circulated outside of the restricted paywalls of academic publishing and library licensing has been a priority of mine for a long time. Before entering my graduate studies, I spent a lot of time photocopying zines and bootlegging essays and books that I found important politically. Having fully reentered academia, I was eager for a chance to learn about the formal avenues for open access.

As a political theorist, I often teach ancient and modern texts that are technically in the public domain. In the US, this includes all texts that were published before 1923. In part because of this, I chose to make my course “Introduction to Political Thought”, a foundations course that reads the usual canonized suspects: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc. into a majority Open Access class. I chose this class in particular because I thought it would be an easy course to find Open Educational Resources for. However, I ran into some difficulties because, while many of the texts I teach have freely available versions through excellent websites like Project Gutenberg, they were rarely the translations that I prefer to teach.

Despite this, the Open Knowledge Fellowship has opened vast oceans of archival material and texts that I know will enrich my courses and make them much more creative at no cost to my students. I find this fellowship absolutely essential for CUNY students. In the CUNY system, more than half of our students come from families with household incomes under $30,000. Given this, serious funding for Open Access and library materials should be an essential priority throughout the CUNY system. I see this fellowship as a rare and essential beacon of that effort at CUNY. Further, the principles of open access relate to the basic questions of the Introduction to Political Theory Class: What is the public good? How does “the public good” relate to public goods? What is democracy? What is the relation of power to knowledge? How has justice been defined? How do we conceive of freedom? While exploring these questions behind paywalls or prohibitively expensive course materials may be a special kind of experiment in sardonic and punitive pedagogy, it doesn’t seem like it would be a particularly effective or desirable one.

Another thing that will remain with me from one of the many wonderful workshops of the Open Knowledge Fellowship was the import of prioritizing open access as I publish my own scholarly articles. I will also not be likely to forget the workshop in which we explored a number of grifter pseudo-academic pay-to-play publishing operations which charge around $1,000 per article and capitalize off of the increasing pressures to publish that scholars face for the job market. One striking insight that was shared was how these grifter operations are not quite so different from exclusive private publishing operations that make large profits from restricting access and charging high fees to libraries and public institutions for educational materials. I walk away from the fellowship with an invigorated passion for open access, with a richer sense of the databases and resources available to my students.

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